The result is indeed a maestra’s portrait of her age, a project at once staggeringly ambitious and entirely of a piece with a quarter-century body of work that teases so delightfully along the limits of EM Forster’s question: “What does a novel do?” Which makes it all the more pleasing to report that, like the other novels in the series, Summer is a refreshing innovation of form and content, inhabiting the region Smith identified in her essayistic hybrid of fiction/nonfiction Artful as “the forbidden magic at the border of things”. Smith’s dazzling experiment in simultaneity has pointedly thumbed its nose at rules of thumb. And you would be so proud of me because I spoke up and said but what about the artist portraying her own age, and when I did I was nearly laughed out of the room … ” His fellow detainees have been debating this very issue: “ Should The Artist Portray His Age?. Devotees of the series will recognise Daniel Gluck as its moral centre in this novel he writes to his sister Hannah about life in a British internment camp during the second world war. Can any novel produced at such lightning pace possibly be good? Summer provides a cheeky nod to this inevitable question.

One rule of thumb would have it that the smaller the gap, the lesser the art. The project has been an attempt to narrow the gap not only between a novel’s conception and its publication, but between art and the reality it consumes in order to produce itself. Beginning with Autumnin 2016, they have arrived punctually, one per year, each in its eponymous season and as close to the events described as possible. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something.” Smith’s quartet of seasonal novels has also been heading for summer. “S ummer,” says a character in Ali Smith’s new novel, “is really an imagined end.

Summer by ali smith review